In which I recount at last the glory of Loi Krathong...

I don't think I've seen any stars in my time in Chiang Mai. The particular Thai predilection for neon and other luminous signage hides the heavens very effectively within the city, and I have yet to spend an evening outside Chiang Mai. I hadn't thought about this much since I arrived.

But I suspect this only amplified my joy and wonder on Saturday night, when I looked up from the center of the city to see the sky lit by hundreds of red and yellow stars, like newborn constellations rising slowly and shrinking into sharp points thousands of feet above my head. One of the greatest joys of Loi Krathong, the Thai Festival of light, is that countless thousands of people light crude but effective balloon lamps - huge paper bags with rings of paraffin anchored to the bottom - and set them adrift over the city. I stood at the edge of the Mae Nam Ping river, the calm eye to Loi Krathong's frenetic hurricane, and watched while pyrotechnics exploded from every corner of Chiang Mai. Individually, the lanterns are pretty - and great fun to set loose. But when viewed by the hundreds across the great sweep of the city, the effect is beyond magical. It's one of the most beautiful things I've seen.

It's also next to impossible to photograph, at least with the unimpressive alchemy of my reasonably-priced camera and my modest photographic skills. My attempts to capture the actual flying lanterns turned out underwhelming at best, so I'll keep them to myself. But by way of compensation, here's a photo of some locals cheerfully lighting their own lantern - it really is a group effort with several people holding the contraption inflated while the paraffin heats, so that it doesn't collapse on itself and immolate.



A bit of background - cheerfully offered by the tiny, effervescent woman from whom I bought my krathong. Loi Krathong is takes place on the weekend nearest the full moon of the twelfth lunar month, usually in early November. People purchase wondrously decorated banana leaf rafts called krathongs - about eight inches across and festooned with flowers, candles, and incense - and float them down the river, ideally along with their sins and misfortune. The effect it to fill much of the massive, leisurely river with thousands drifting stars, mirroring the glorious canopy of lanterns above.

This is a ritual of apology to the river goddess Khongkha, and it has been incorporated into the near-universal Theraveda Buddhist rites observed in Thailand.
Naturally, though of indeterminate spirituality myself, I suppose everyone can do with a little expunging of sins from time to time. So here I hoist my krathong - which is truly much nicer than most of the other kratongs, particularly according to the lady who sold it to me.



And, here's the same krathong (far left) enjoying its journey down the Mae Nam Ping...



Loi Krathong has three nights, by the way, Saturday through Monday. Saturday was the glorious yet occasionally tranquil celebration of fire and good cheer I mention above. I sat with new friends (some NGO workers, and some people I met on the songthaew) in the delightful Riverside Restaurant for several hours, indulging in curious food and plentiful cocktails, enjoying the fine conversation and the omnipresent pyrotechnics. In fact, here's an unexceptionable but rather attractive (dont'cha think?) photo of me in that very milieu:



Sunday, the festival's centrepiece was a city-wide epileptic fit of bad manners and worse judgment - particularly as regards appropriate places to fling military-grade firecrackers. But there's still much fun to be had. I lit a lantern of my own, for example, and after a long and worrisome pause it finally took hesitant flight (photo to come soon). I set free the above-described krathong, and I witnessed the fascinating and somewhat oddly-textured parade that wends through east Chiang Mai in the final nights. Witness, for example, a robotic elephant:



Followed shortly by someone apparently associated with the Royal Family:



Try as I did, I couldn't find a unifying theme to this parade - except of course, Thai-ness. In fact, that Thai-ness was the most fascinating thing about the festival. The Thais, their habit of applauding military coups notwithstanding, love their country and culture with a pride bordering on jingoism. It's not abrasive (not yet, anyway), just interesting to watch, and it seems to have bestowed a curious sort of cultural resilience to Thailand. Foreign tourists are everywhere, and Loi Krathong was particularly clogged with them (us?), but somehow the festival, for all its noise and pomp and commerce, still struck me as remarkably, authentically Thai. There was no denying that Loi Krathong was for the Thais, and we farang, for all the fun we had, were just welcome visitors - the festival wasn't held for our benefit at all. This may sound mundane, but if you've seen the gravitational effect that heavy tourist traffic tends to have on local rites around the world, it's remarkable. Usually, through no deliberate effort on anyone's part, the locus of major events shifts to tourists, simply because that's where the money is.

Yet while there was no shortage of merchants hawking unidentified goods in fractured English, I didn't sense even a hint of pandering in the entire event. Thailand is large enough, populous enough, wealthy enough and has a rich enough tradition to support its own complete culture without necessary resort to foreign influence - a luxury few developing countries are able (or willing) to afford. It's a refreshing thing, and I'm beginning to expect (cautiously) that this integrity across Thailand (with the likely exception of the backpacker oases of the far south). I look forward to finding out.

Loi Krathong, of course, made a stunning place to start. I've decided, my ongoing adventures with Photoshop notwithstanding, that it's perhaps not meant to be photographed. Like Victoria Falls, which I found similarly confounds photography, it can only really be understood in person. If you want to know what I mean, you know where to find out. I promise you, it'll be worth the trip.